THE thing is, the comedian Al Murray tells me, it’s not so very long ago when he was being told that his whole act was passe. When the idea of Al Murray Pub Landlord (the comedian’s creation) railing against the perfidies of political correctness and the rest of Europe was old hat.

“I remember going through a period with the act – probably as recently as five, six, seven years ago – with people going: ‘Why are you still banging on about that? No-one cares about that,’” he tells me.

“And I remember thinking: ‘No, this is right at the heart of how a lot of people think and it has not gone away.”

Turns out, Murray was right.

Monday morning in December. We will get to Christmas and Murray’s ITV prime-time festive show in which, in his guise as the Pub Landlord, he gets to duet with Honey G and Myleene Klass on Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody in a minute, I promise.

But right now, as he sits in his home in Chiswick in west London on a day off from panto duties, here’s the question. Given the Brexity, Trumpity state we find ourselves in, does that mean we are now living in the Pub Landlord’s world now?

“I think we maybe do, yeah. How ghastly,” Murray says, laughing.

Al Murray created the Pub Landlord back in 1994 at the Edinburgh Fringe. Two decades on you could argue that his creation has gone mainstream. And not just because he has his own Christmas special next week.

Opinions that once seemed extreme, so extreme that Murray could make fun of them, now seem, well, kind of normal.

Which must, I suggest, make it a bugger to wring laughs out of them. “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “The last two years have been weird. To try to keep up with it has been really interesting.

“But the development that came in the [Pub Landlord] act in the last couple of years is he’s now making appalling, mealy-mouthed calls for unity rather like a whole bunch of politicians who’ve spent their life’s work trying to split us in two. And then they turn around and say: ‘It’s time for us to all come together.’

“That’s really funny. That anyone could have the f****** neck to behave like that. So, I’ve had him doing that basically.”

Note that “he” and “him”. Al Murray the comedian and Al Murray Pub Landlord are not the same thing. That probably shouldn’t need saying. But I don’t know. We constantly blur creators and creations in our heads, don’t we? But there’s a distance. Let’s use Christmas as a measure. What would a pub landlord’s Christmas be like, I ask Murray? “He’s the repository for everyone trying to get away from their families,” he says.

And what is Al Murray’s the comedian’s like? “An Al Murray Christmas starts on Christmas Eve because my grandmother was Austrian and we do a bit of gift-giving on Christmas Eve in the European stylee.”

That, in itself, would be suspicious to the pub landlord of course. Sorry Al, I interrupted. “And then I cook Christmas lunch,” he continues. “I’ve got a barbecue in the garden so I will bake a turkey in that or a goose. And it’s all very mellow.”

Hold on, you cook in the garden? What if it’s cold? “I’ll cook in bad weather. If you’re pissed it doesn’t matter, does it?”

The comedian and his creation are united in alcohol at least.

Al Murray is 48, the father of two teenage girls, a privately educated Oxford graduate whose great-great-great grandfather was some bloke called William Makepeace Thackeray. His grandfather on his mum’s side was killed in the Second World War. His dad did his national service as an engineer and paratrooper.

Murray himself has something of an obsession with the Second World War – he’s even made the odd documentary about it – although the only flak he has ever had to dodge has been the odd heckle and bad review.

As someone who saw Murray palling around with his mate Harry Hill at the Edinburgh Fringe back at the start of the 1990s, I tell him, I’m not sure I could have predicted that both would become ITV prime-time material. They both seemed a little too leftfield back then.

But both are prime-time regulars now and Murray can now say he has his own Christmas show. It contains typical pub landlord stand-up (“Jesus is British,” the Pub Landlord tells us at one point), a very ITV guest list (think reality TV stars and ex-boyband members) and, as already intimated, it all ends in a mass singalong

Murray is thrilled by the whole thing. “A prime-time TV show, as a train set to play with, is always a lot of fun. We had a fantastic time putting it together and doing some things I’ve been working towards in the last few years mainly in Edinburgh – like working with a band and writing some songs and making the pub landlord into more of an all-round entertainer as he fancies himself.”

It is very much in the vein of old-school variety specials, he says. And yet there’s a spot of postmodern knowingness as well. “We’ve delivered up something ancient and modern is the best way of putting it.”

Here’s the thing. If I’m honest I didn’t really get the Pub Landlord when I first saw him. It’s possible I even thought he’s just Richard Littlejohn with better jokes. Certainly, the question has always are we laughing at the character or laughing with him?

I think if you pay close enough attention it should be clear. But Murray himself admits it’s impossible to be sure. “I think ultimately there’s no way of knowing. I think in general my audiences get where I’m coming from, get what I’m doing. I’ve always felt I built enough fail-safes into the act to sort of cover it. But you can never know what anyone’s laughing at or why they’re laughing at something. You can only take a hopeful educated guess.

“When I ran for parliament two years ago suddenly a bunch of people were going: ‘Oh s***, I had no idea this was a parody.’ And that led me to think: ‘Really? God, because I thought this was laden with clues.’

About that election bid. In 2015 Murray stood in the South Thanet constituency. He even created his own party the FKUP. Coincidentally (or not) a certain Nigel Farage was also standing for the South Thanet seat for Ukip. Neither of them got elected (although, admittedly, Nigel did pole rather more votes than Al).

“The thing I learned,” says Murray reflecting on the experience, “is that being a politician is s*** because everyone hates you. There’s the idea that: ‘Oh God, they’re all in it for themselves.’ Well, some of them are, obviously, but lots of people are in things for themselves in all sorts of other jobs. Why are you a journalist? Are you in it to shine light on truth or for yourself?”

Maybe to pay the mortgage. “Well, exactly. And I think a lot of politicians are doing it to pay the mortgage. It’s what they are good at. But everyone f****** hates them. It’s the most thankless task in the world. All political careers end in failure and disgrace. Why would anyone do it was the thing I came away with. I was just doing it for s**** and giggles.”

Umm, so are you saying you feel sorry for them? “No I don’t. Not at all. That’s the thing they’ve gone into, so they must know that’s the territory.”

Come to think of it, after his election experience, he’s not sure the rest of the political structure is particularly fit for purpose either. “I also thought, to be honest, the way the TV news media behave as a pack; they’re not really interested in what you’ve got to say. They want to trip you up.

“I don’t know that that necessarily means we get to understand the people that are seeking to lead us any better by seeking to trip them up the whole time.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how else you do it. I’m certainly not offering any solutions.”

And yet for all that he was a joke candidate, standing in the General Election was in part, he says, a reaction to Russell Brand telling everyone not to vote. Brand is not the only comedian to suggest as much of course. Billy Connolly always used to say “don’t vote, it only encourages them,” I remind him.

“I always felt that Connolly never meant that. That’s a great line. I rather felt that Russell went into it with what he regarded as detail. And it was nonsense. He said: ‘Voting never changes anything.’ Well, no, that’s not true. Voting changes all sorts of things and it changes things all the time. Don’t be stupid.”

Let’s draw back, shall we? Why did Murray want to be a comedian in the first place. It’s not as if the military backgrounds of his father and grandfather were role models for the performing life after all.

Ah, but, his father’s uncle was a Shakespearean actor and turned up in The Navy Lark in the 1960s and 1970s, he points out. “And I always knew I was flat-footed and cowardly and that following in that tradition wasn’t for me.

“I did a lot of acting and performing at school and I thought that I might want to pursue that and then I started doing comedy at uni. There was a really strong crowd doing it when I got there. Armando Iannucci was there. Dave Schneider. Stewart Lee, Rich Herring. It just felt like that it was a possibility.”

Murray first came to the Fringe in 1988 and that confirmed his choice for him. That said, he admits, back then just a few years after the explosion of alternative comedy there was a slight anti-Oxbridge feeling in the air. “Oh yeah. A lot of people being really hostile to it and I remember us all thinking: ‘We’re all just trying to do gags. We’re not here to fight with anyone.’

“But that first Edinburgh felt very peculiar. I remember Rich [Herring] being really aggrieved by it because he’d gone to a comprehensive in Somerset somewhere. He didn’t fit that mould. He’d done well in his A Levels. I would be like: ‘Yeah, that kind of fits me. But we’re just trying to have fun.”

Murray says since then he’s not really talked about his time at Oxford for that reason. That said, the thing about stand-up, he adds, is that it’s inherently meritocratic. “If you make an audience laugh and the promoter hates you he’ll still book you because you’re doing the thing he needs you to do.”

He’d like to branch out. Maybe do a bit of acting. The panto experience – Jack and the Beanstock, his first – has just confirmed that for him. Being part of a company, he has discovered, is huge fun. But given that he spends 18 months out of 24 on tour, he’d quite like a break from that to spend more time with his family and Second World War memorabilia. Talking of which, here’s my other grand theory. The fact that we are so obsessed with our own Second World War story is the reason we’re in the spot we’re in now. Our culture is drenched in what we might call an “ourselves alone” narrative (to steal a line from an organisation who might not enjoy being associated with the UK). And maybe that has led us to vote to leave the EU.

“Oh, I think you are absolutely right,” Murray says. “I completely agree. We regard the war so differently to the way the rest of Europe looks at it. Because it didn’t happen here the same way. We didn’t have the Wehrmacht turn up and then the Red Army.”

“So, we view ourselves as sticking it out and all that and I think that’s why we’ve ended up with this very peculiar view of ourselves.”

“I am fascinated by the war and I’m fascinated by Spitfires. But I don’t get a tear in my eye when I hear one or wish I’d flown it or wish I’d been at Arnhem or any of that mad stuff because … That’s crazy.

“My mother never knew her father because he was killed at Dunkirk. That’s the war. Nothing else. It’s not ‘Spitfires are beautiful and don’t they sound great?’ Yeah, they are and they do, but the war is people’s dads not coming home. And that shouldn’t happen again.”

Give peace a chance? That’s as good a Christmas message as any, isn’t it? Have a good one, one and all.

Al Murray’s Make Christmas Great Again is on STV at 9pm on Friday.